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Buffy Sainte-Marie on her fresh dose of old medicine

“Where are all the protest songs?” emerged as a common lament when the mere possibility of a Trump presidency was still flickering like a disturbing mirage on the distant horizon of early 21st-century history, and the demand certainly hasn’t diminished since.

Well, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s got protest songs. Fifty years’ worth, actually. And people have been asking her where to find them all so much lately that she finally just decided to gather them all together in one spot for convenience’s sake — with, as always, the hope that they might actually unleash some good upon the world — on her just-released album, Medicine Songs.

The Polaris Music Prize, presented by CBC Music and produced by Blue Ant Media, releases its second Polaris Collaboration Session featuring 2015 Polaris winner Buffy Sainte-Marie and 2014 winner Tanya Tagaq.

“I wanted to corral all my activist songs in one place,” says Sainte-Marie, an impossibly youthful 76, over a meal on King Street earlier this week. “And by ‘activist’ songs I don’t mean just ‘protest’ songs like ‘Universal Soldier’ or ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,’ but also things like ‘Carry It On,’ ‘Soldier Blue,’ ‘Starwalker’ — they’re not protesting anything, they’re going the opposite way. A protest song kind of lays out a problem or an issue and says how you want to change it, right? But these other songs, the real positive ones, we don’t have a name for them but they’re really encouraging. There’s just not a name for them.”

So no, then, Sainte-Marie’s commitment to crusading against the follies of war and environmental degradation, for better treatment of Indigenous peoples and the lands stolen from them, against inequality and corporate greed and for human decency in general remains undiminished as she steers ever closer to her 80th year.

Her commitment to uncompromising artistry hasn’t waned at all over the decades, either. Rather than take the easy route with Medicine Songs and crank out a simple compilation album, Saint-Marie went back into the studio, tore apart her old songs and dressed them up with updated lyrics and ferocious new arrangements to better fit the tenor of the times. There are also a couple of mood-appropriate new tunes in the mix, a rousing duet with Inuk powerhouse Tanya Tagaq — with whom she connected after winning the Polaris Music Prize for Power in the Blood in 2015, a year after Tagaq took the same award for Animism — called “You Got to Run (Spirit of the Wind)” and a biting, electroshocked tirade against war profiteering entitled “The War Racket.”

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“I could have put out a playlist but I didn’t want to do that. I mean, I sing ’em every night and I think I sing ’em better now than I did on the originals,” shrugs the Saskatchewan expat. “ ‘Universal Soldier’ and ‘Now that the Buffalo’s Gone,’ I did them exactly the same way as before because they were right the first time. Acoustic guitar and vocal. I don’t have a better way to do it and I think anything I added to it would be just detracting from it. But then other things, we did quite differently, we added things to.

“They’re my songs. I know what I’m doing. I looked at is an opportunity, really, not only to give them to my ‘classic’ fans but also to new generations who’ve never heard those songs because they are about important issues that people care about.

“Some of my songs, you know, they were never heard or I put ’em out too early. I was talking about genocide on ‘My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying’ in the ’60s, and people thought I must be mistaken — the little Indian girl who’ll make you cry, she must be mistaken. But man, I had a f---ing college degree and all I was writing was a list of bulletproof facts.”

Sainte-Marie jokes that she learned the value of bringing old ideas back around during her on-again/off-again tenure on Sesame Street from 1976 to 1981 because “there’s always a new crop of 5-year-olds” to educate.

She’s also right about a lot of her songs not always reaching the audience they deserved at the time of their writing. She found out through a radio broadcaster during the 1980s that her sudden abandonment by mainstream radio and TV during the 1960s was the result of White House-approved “blacklisting” by media outlets largely owned by the energy companies she was taking issue with in song for their treatment of Indigenous peoples and the environment — she’s seen the FBI files — so a lot of them were simply suppressed, for one thing.

Buffy Sainte-Marie performs during the Canada Day noon hour show on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Saturday, July 1, 2017. (Justin Tang / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

But Sainte-Marie, who was introducing folk music to synthesizers back on 1969’s Illuminations, has also often tended to be so forward-thinking creatively that it’s taken audiences awhile to catch up with what she was doing back in the day.

“ ‘My Country ’Tis of Thy People You’re Dying’ was far too early,” she says. “And when it comes to songwriting and songs as medicine, there’s no sense in scattering the medicine around before the people who need it get to your doorstep. Sometimes you have to carry the medicine for a long time. You have to wait for the disease to hit.”

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Saint-Marie plays three shows in support of Medicine Songs around the 905 this week — one at the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts on Wednesday, one at Mississauga’s Living Arts Centre on Thursday and another the Burlington Performing Arts Centre on Friday.

Then, counter to conventional record-release wisdom, after a date in Alberta she plans to return to her cats and her chickens in Hawaii and take a little break. Her job is done, after all. She has, once again, lived up to her staunch belief in individual action and taking individual responsibility for the good and ill that goes on in the world. Maybe it’s time someone else stepped up to the plate.

“It’s the way I think. It’s not the way everybody thinks,” she says. “Where was the music when Bernie Sanders was running for office? Where are Sting’s protest songs? What, is Paul Simon blind? I mean, why don’t they write them? Why aren’t they writing them? Or maybe they are writing them and they’re shy to deliver them to the record company because they believe the record companies are only in it for the money or something. I don’t know. But it is a question.

“I was thrilled when Gord Downie stepped forward (with the residential school screed Secret Path) because, on that issue, hockey fans and beer drinkers are not very much gonna listen to me and Tanya Tagaq. When he stepped forward, he reached a huge, huge section of the population that I would never reach . . . Canadians are sensitive. They can be touched. And it’s worth trying.”

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